


empty houses and empty rooms

by Mattition



Series: I am creation both haunted and holy [1]
Category: The Magnus Archives (Podcast)
Genre: Ambiguous/Open Ending, Character Study, Gen, Lonely Avatar Jonathan "Jon" Sims | The Archivist, Mentioned Georgie Barker, Not Beta Read
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-31
Updated: 2020-10-31
Packaged: 2021-03-09 00:08:08
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,634
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27305344
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Mattition/pseuds/Mattition
Summary: I’ll be alone / 'til it feels like a friend.I’ll sing out my groans/ 'til they sound like hymns
Relationships: Peter Lukas & Jonathan "Jon" Sims | The Archivist
Series: I am creation both haunted and holy [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2092089
Comments: 15
Kudos: 39





	empty houses and empty rooms

**Author's Note:**

> COULD A DEPRESSED PERSON MAKE THIS?!  
> I live for aus where Jon is an avatar for a different entity, so here this is, I guess. pls enjoy my vent lol
> 
> See end notes for TWs
> 
> ETA: maybe i wrote a [ stealth sequel ](https://archiveofourown.org/works/28021860) to this

Jon is an empty house full of locked doors.

It’s better this way, really. He’s been alone for as long as he can remember. His connections to other people have always been fragile, fraying threads, easily broken.

Jon is a curse upon other people. He is all sharp edges and cutting words. Those who try to get to close and are not rebuffed immediately are lost to his wafting miasma of misery.

His parents were the first. They had birthed an empty room and had not noticed. They had done their best to love the angry, fussy child, their first born, but it had been so tiring, and they’d left him with his grandmother for a weekend, just to have a moment of rest away from the child, so taxing was he on their energy. The car crash killed them both, and their tethers snapped so easily. Jon’s grandmother’s thread was snipped that day, too, by the woman herself. It was his fault her son was dead, and though she had loved Jon in her distant way, she would never forget that fact. 

It hurts, when your connections to other people are cut. It is a rush of anguish and loneliness and a prelude to a worser fate. Jon must have decided to stop sewing connections, at some point, but he does not recall. He cannot resist it when others seem determined to stitch themselves to him, but he is careful to let the threads fray naturally. 

He is a harbinger of death. He watches idly by, shaking and trembling in fear, as a nameless childhood bully is eaten alive by an impossible monster. He lets himself feel the shuddering rush of sourceless grief, for one unending moment, then carefully tucks the memory into a box, sets it in the creaking, dusty attic in his mind, and locks the door. He feels, if not better, if not good, at least empty enough to pretend to be.

The emptiness is a rush, like a sudden burst of sea wind passing through the crumbling pillars of the abandoned pier. The breeze is strong enough to knock off bits of the pillars, but he didn’t need them anyway.

The attic grows full.

He slowly sifts through the memories, puts some aside for safekeeping, locks doors behind himself. He doesn’t need them intruding when he’s working.

And he works. He lets the screaming nightmares cool to silent nightly terrors, so as not to disturb further his grandmother. When they wake him, he reluctantly prepares himself for another endless day, and begins whatever research he’d been in the middle of. And the days keep coming. He had hoped, deep in the basement of his heart, that he himself would eventually become a victim to his curse. And maybe he would. Maybe he will. Maybe he already has. But each day he wakes, too early, too late, he mourns the rising sun. 

He shrouds himself in a comforting sea fog of nothingness, wears it like a child wears a blanket. He sits in the empty house perched in the middle of a bay, the pier is there, crumbled to almost nothing, reaching out desperately towards the shore, where he can see people, with their strings, tangled and messy, creating a multicoloured web from which he must carefully disentangle himself every single day before making his way back to the refuge of his emptiness. 

It does not get easier with age. They say that it will. It gets better, they tell him. The child psychologist his grandmother had eventually taken him to give him homework, tasks which force him to sew and weave, which repel him. The psychiatrist he is forced to see prescribes him pills, little pockets of disjointed suffering, that make the comforting dullness go away, that give him precious, delirious moments of saturation and warmth, which he hates and loves in equal measure, then dump him bodily back into the sea, without even the refuge of the rotted pier to keep him above the waters. 

He stops taking the pills and works on building his little island in the bay. Close enough to shore that he can watch it, make sure it is not encroaching, close enough to step on land when he must. Far enough to keep people away from him. They will not brave the waters, for they are icy cold and depthless, full of rocks and sharp things, creatures which hunger. Sometimes he cannot tell himself from those ravenous beasts. He wants for something; the basement of his heart is cool and damp and he keeps no boxes there for fear of mold. But he wishes, sometimes, for something to be safe from the unlivable conditions of the basement that he could keep it there, but nothing comes. 

It is a requirement of his condition that he become an actor. When he must step ashore, more often than he would prefer, he must puppet himself like the rest of them, though he has no strings. He has learned that those on land do not accept those asea, so he builds himself something of a dive suit, a heavy, clunking thing, so he may navigate the treacherous waters of human interaction. The weight never lessens, only grows, but he, too grows, and is accustomed to its heft. 

It is not getting easier to bear, but he carries it.

His body exists, which is a shame. For all that the dive suit protects him from the perilous, scheming weave of threads, he must show his face, he must lift his visor. He hates it, worries that someone may catch his cheek with their cruel needle, and tie their thread.

All his precautions, the empty house, for it is him, his carefully built island and his beautiful, foreboding pier, those sacred waters, so deep and dark, they are not enough. He must leave his helmet off for too long, because Georgie attaches a thread to him. She is callous in her attempts, mercilessly reaching out and offering him support and love and kindness. Her reaching hands are too warm, hot, and burn his frostbitten skin. But god, are they soft. Her warmth is a siren song, and he is a creature of the ocean. She is empty in her own way, just cool enough that the burns she inflicts are soothed. It is a dangerous sort of feeling, friendship. She helps him move some boxes into the basement of his heart and labels them in glittering gold ink. She is a skilled weaver, which he does not notice until it is too late.

He is threaded through with strings. Her friends have no comforting coolness to sooth his fears, and he struggles against his bonds. They are fragile things. He shreds them without remorse. It _hurts_. And god if he doesn’t enjoy the suffering. He frantically stuffs boxes in the attic, tries to open the locked door to the basement as it floods, but the door is stuck and the ink on those pretty boxes runs.

The basement of his heart is locked. He doesn’t know where the key is, or, indeed, if it is even in his possession. He is bitter at the loss. He can feel the boxes there growing mold. It makes him sick. He had tried so hard to protect that precious space, protect others from residing there, but he was too weak and let someone row out to his island. There is a terrible string which connects her to him. He cannot cut it. She must cut it herself, but he is too afraid to ask it of her, lest she try again to feed him into her loom. He puts a fence up around his empty house. He makes his island a cliff, rocky and uninhabitable. He fills the bay with ice drifts, and calls scarier creatures to patrol the waters. He hopes it will be enough to keep others on shore where they belong. He sits before the basement door and mourns the loss of his access to it. 

London has her own waters. They are not the same as the sea in Bournemouth, but they are soothing enough. Sometimes he lingers by the docks at night. He chain smokes and revels in the fog. It is this habit which introduces him to Peter Lukas. 

The Tundra is an ugly, square ship, red and black and grey. It pulls into harbour late that night, and the crew works silently. Jon watches with little interest. He doesn’t want any of them to notice him and he pulls his cloak of fog and cigarette smoke closer to his body. It shrouds him enough that the crew of the ship either do not see him or understand that he is an island they cannot reach. The same cannot be said for their captain. He is a tall, broad man, jovial in a way Jon has never been able to accomplish. He wears no dive suit, for all that he is an island himself. He is encompassing in a way Jon has never witnessed. He trails threads, some dull and heavy, some glittering and taut, but none pull at him. He is a man of mists and creaking corridors, but he is tangible. And he plucks Jon out of his fog and makes him tangible as well. The suddenness of it aches and the sensations of the world without his heavy suit threaten to send him to his knees, trembling and weak as a newborn foal. 

The man’s laugh holds no water. If Jon is an empty bowl with a lid shut tight, this man is a sieve. Jon longs for the key to his basement. The man supports his fragile body, and his hands are blessed cold. 

“Hullo, lovely, where have you been hiding?”

**Author's Note:**

> TWs:  
> death mention, smoking mention, therapy mention, graphic depictions of depressive mindstates??  
> Lonely-typical Bad Brain Stuff
> 
> Lonely imagery go brrrrrrrrrr  
> FUCK I love the Lonely, second in my heart only to the Vast. Vast is sexier, but Lonely has Vibes.  
> on that vein, i love the boy beter lugas, and i would give him my soul if he only asked.  
> Anyways, I literally wrote this in like 2 hours so pls forgive me 
> 
> lyrics in the summary are from Rusty Clanton's Comfort [ Thanks for reading!!](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3GnRihnG5a0)


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